Plot
While working as a barroom bouncer, sailor Steve Morgan (Max Baer) impresses alcoholic ex-boxing manager "the Professor" (Walter Huston) with his skills. The Professor talks Steve into entering a prize fight with an up-and-coming boxer to make money for both of them.
While out training on the road, Steve is nearly run over by a speeding car that crashes into a ditch. He carries nightclub singer Belle Mercer (Myrna Loy) out of the wreckage. Though she is attracted to him, she refuses to have anything to do with Steve. He learns where she lives and goes to see her anyway. He is too cocky to be concerned when she reveals that she is the girlfriend of well-known gangster Willie Ryan (Otto Kruger). When Willie finds out, Belle reassures him she is in control of her emotions. Willie is not so certain about that, but is too shrewd to have Steve killed out of hand by his bodyguard, whom he jokingly calls his "Adopted Son" (Robert McWade). It turns out that he had cause for concern; Steve persuades Belle to marry him. Deeply in love with Belle himself and still hoping to get her back, Willie lets Steve live.
Steve quickly rises through the boxing ranks. However, he cannot keep from fooling around with other women. When Belle catches him in a lie, she tells him that she loves him, but if he cheats on her once more, she will leave him. While waiting for a bout for the heavyweight championship of the world, Steve performs in a musical revue. When Belle unexpectedly goes to his dressing room, she finds a woman hiding there. It is the end of their marriage. She gets her old job back with Willie.
Anxious to see the overconfident Steve humiliated, Willie finds out what is holding up the match with the current champion, Primo Carnera (playing himself), and pays $25,000 to set it up. When the Professor tries to get Steve to train properly (without women and liquor), Steve gets angry and slaps him, ending their partnership.
The championship bout is refereed by boxing promoter and former champion Jack Dempsey (himself). Belle, Willie and the Professor are all in attendance. For most of the ten-round fight, Steve gets pummeled by the much heavier Carnera. Finally, a distraught Belle urges the Professor to forget his wounded pride and go to Steve's corner to provide much needed advice. With his old friend and his ex-wife rooting him on, a heartened Steve makes a furious comeback in the final rounds. The match ends in a draw; Carnera retains his title.
Later, Willie enters Belle's nightclub dressing room and tells her she is fired. Then he brings Steve in and leaves the couple alone to reconcile.
Read more about this topic: The Prizefighter And The Lady
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)